ELK 0.1.0 reasoner for OWL EL released

[Markus Krötzsch]

We are happy to announce the first release of the new

ELK 0.1.0
Reasoner for OWL EL
http://elk-reasoner.googlecode.com/

ELK is a free and open source reasoner for the lightweight ontology
language OWL 2 EL. It is based on Java and can be controlled using the
OWL API [1], Protégé [2], the Snow Owl ontology editor [3], or a basic
command line interface. ELK is available under the Apache License 2.0.

ELK is very fast. It can classify the SNOMED CT ontology with around
300,000 classes in less than 4 seconds on a modern laptop [4]. This is
achieved by highly optimized consequence-based reasoning algorithms
that can also take advantage of multi-core CPUs.

ELK 0.1.0 is the very first release of ELK. It still has only limited
support for OWL constructs and does not yet implement all reasoning
tasks that the OWL API includes. Its main features are:

* Reasoning tasks: classification and consistency checking
* Supported OWL constructs: ELH fragment + transitivity
(ObjectIntersectionOf, ObjectSomeValuesFrom, SubClassOf,
EquivalentClasses, SubObjectPropertyOf, TransitiveObjectProperty)
* Optional OWL API bindings
* Protégé plugin (can also be used in Snow Owl)
* Command line interface
* Parser for input files in OWL 2 Functional Style Syntax

ELK can be run in all operating systems that support Java 1.5 or
above. For further details, please see the online documentation [5].

We are continuing to develop ELK into a reasoner that covers all OWL
EL features and common reasoning tasks. Use cases, practical
application requirements and other feedback is welcome. The ELK
reasoner discussion group [6] is available for further discussions.
People who are interested in contributing can also contact the
developers [7] directly.

Markus

[1] http://owlapi.sourceforge.net/
[2] http://protege.stanford.edu/
[3] http://www.b2international.com/portal/snow-owl
[4] http://korrekt.org/page/Concurrent_Classification_of_EL_Ontologies_(Technical_Report)
[5] http://code.google.com/p/elk-reasoner/wiki/ELK_Documentation
[6] http://groups.google.com/group/elk-reasoner-discussion
[7] The current maintainers of ELK are: Yevegeny Kazakov, Markus
Krötzsch, František Simančík.